SEA DOG DAYS
.30AM. “Paul . . . Paul . . . Paul . . . Paul . . .” I hear her eventually, swimming up from the blissful depths of sleep, as she whispers through the curtain of my bunk. It’s pitch black and for a second I don’t know where I am. Then I smell the Stockholm tar — the whole ship reeks of it — and hear the gurgle of sea rushing past the hull, and I remember.
“I’m awake,” I mutter with the conviction of someone who isn’t. The soft voice whispers in Australian. “Muster midships,” she says. “It’s raining. And there’s lightning, so wear shoes.” And then she’s gone.
I dress in my bunk, feeling the ship roll beneath me. “Big sea,” I think, pulling on my cheapskate foul-weather gear and lacing my boots. I swing out of the bunk into the silent darkness of the salon and clamber up the companionway to the deck, trying not to fall off the ladder.
My watch — the 4am-to-8am crew — are already there, mere outlines in the rolling blackness. It is raining, and lightning is flashing across the sky. “Morning,” says my watch officer. Her name is Beamy. (“Beamy?” I asked her the day before. “Well it’s actually Amy, but there was another Amy when I got on board. So, Beamy . . .” Right.)
“I see there’s a party in your pocket,” she says.
What? I look down. My stupid torch has flicked on in strobe mode. It’s a sin to show white light at sea at night (to avoid confusing watchkeepers on other ships). (“No lights,” hissed Magnus, the young Danish sail apprentice the night before when I came stumbling along the main deck at the end of my watch. “Never! Always off. OK?”)
All the salty crew have flashlights with red lenses. I am not salty. “Sorry,” I mutter.
Beamy leads us to the quarterdeck where we relieve the midnight-to-4am watch. Jens, a German IT technician with a thick, luxuriant salty U-boat commander’s beard takes the helm. “North by west,” mutters the departing helmsman.
“Yiss,” says west.”
Beamy taps me on the shoulder. “Watch how he does it,” she says.
We are still “steaming”, moving under power, as we have been since weighing anchor in Table Bay the day before, and Jens makes it look vastly better than my attempt the previous afternoon when as soon as I took the helm, the compass card began to swing like a drunk. First it drifted lazily eastwards. I countered with a flick of the wheel, counting the spokes under my hands, chasing the needle. The card stopped. Then it swung to the west. I cursed, feeling the stern rise beneath my feet, slewing the ship off by another degree. I flicked the wheel the other way. The needle spun like a dervish.
“Ah, show him how to do it,” said the ship’s captain, Daniel Moreland, who had been watching my antics with little pleasure.
“Yiss,” said Jens. He took the helm and the ship settled down, and the compass swung slowly back to its proper place. North by
Jens, “north by west. “Did I screw that up, Jens?” He cracked a smile. “Yiss.” Captain Moreland has joined us for the morning watch, standing quietly at the lee taffrail, long black sea-coat dripping with rain. He’s as salty as they come. He’s probably sailed around the world more times than any seadog still living.
The Picton Castle is his ship. He found her, a former World War 2 minesweeper with, as he puts it, “good lines”, bought her in Britain, motored back to Lunenburg in Canada, poured 30 tons of concrete into the hold to counter the weight of three masts, and turned her into a square-rigged sail training ship. Now she sails the world on long, slow voyages, crewed by a couple of paid professionals and an eager stream of paying volunteers like me, some young, some old, who cannot resist the siren call of run- ning away to sea in a sailing ship.
I sit quietly by the taffrail and look at my watchmates. There’s Bruce, a spry American in his 60s who speaks like Alan Alda in M*A*S*H and has brought his own sextant with which he takes a noon sight every day. There’s Beamy, the competent lead seaman whose other life is taking kids on outdoor adventures in Britain. There’s Jens and an American named Ryan who has the bunk above mine and for the week that I am at sea will be lying green-gilled on the midships hatch cover or retching over the side. There’s Agnes, the Quiet American sailor with tall ship dreams and Nicole, a writer from Seattle who’s been aboard for seven months since the ship called in Bali.
“I’d been cloistered in my house, living on coffee and tears,” she tells me later. “I’m taking time out of my head.”
And then there’s a sailor we’ll call the “Wizard of Oz”. He’s a “dayman” — no watchkeeping for him — but he’s always around when I’m doing stuff like coiling ropes on the heaving deck in the middle of the night (“What the fuck is this?”), slopping pine tar and linseed oil onto bits of the ship’s rigging (“The purpose of the taaap is to protect the deck, not fuggen spill on”) or cleaning paint brushes (“Nah, still needs cleaning.”)
When not on deck, the wizard is scarce. “No pictures, no interviews,” he tells me. “Got it?”
Everybody thinks he’s on the lam. But then the ship is alive with intrigue. Is one of us really ex-CIA? It is plenty to ponder as we hunch alone with our thoughts in the rain, the sea hissing past, until the captain jolts us from our reverie.
“Do you know how to judge how far away lightning is?” A brief lesson follows. We count the seconds after the lightning flashes. “About